Stanford University

Information Technology

SAFECAST AND FUKUSHIMA FALLOUT: THE POWER OF CITIZEN SCIENCE

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This event is co-sponsored by the Stanford Silicon Valley-New Japan Project and the Japan Society of Northern California.

When the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant experienced a meltdown after the Great East Japan Earthquake in March 2011, people scrambled to get accurate data on radiation. Geiger counters were suddenly a hot commodity. In that moment of crisis, a group of global citizens rose to the occasion to launch Safecast, an open data platform to track, monitor and share data on the radiation levels in Fukushima and throughout Japan. Safecast, a Japan Earthquake Relief Fund grantee, enlisted the help of volunteers who collected the data from all over Japan, and even built its own DIY Geiger counter kit. The Japan Society of Northern California and the Stanford Silicon Valley-New Japan Project are proud to present a program with Pieter Franken, the Co-Founder of Safecast, will look back at Safecast’s evolution—a prime example of citizen science embracing open data and open source—over the last six years and their plans to expand their data gathering efforts to take on new environmental challenges. 

Bio

Pieter Franken's career spans over 25 years in Financial Services, specializing in O&T, Fintech, innovation and large-scale transformations. He has held C-level and executive positions with industry leaders such as Citigroup, Shinsei Bank, Aplus, Monex Securities and Monex Group. His hallmark is pioneering innovative services by implementing bleeding edge technologies while minimizing time-to-market and dramatically reducing costs. Versed in large scale IT transformation, bi-modal management, innovation, software development, datacenter operations, financial operations and FinTech, he is a much looked after advisor and speaker on a wide range of topics and is known for providing deep insights pulling from is wide experience in IT, financial services and innovation management. 

Pieter currently is Senior Advisor at Monex Group (a leading online securities and financial services company in Japan) where he focuses on the Future of Financial Services, Group IT Strategy, Fintech, and Blockchain. 

He is also a member of Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) International Technology Advisory Panel (ITAP) where he contributes in the transformation of Singapore as a leading Fintech Hub. In 2011 Pieter co-founded Safecast.org - a global volunteer initiative to collect citizen sourced environmental data. Pieter also advises startups, such as ModuleQ, an AI startup based in Silicon Valley. Pieter holds a MSc in Computer Science from Delft University (The Netherlands) and currently is a researcher with MIT Media Lab (US) and Keio University (Japan) where he contributes to the advancement in IoT, Digital Currencies, Block-chain technologies and Citizen Science. Pieter is based in Japan and frequently travels across Asia, North America and Europe.

Agenda

4:15pm: Doors open
4:30pm-5:30pm: Talk and Discussion
5:30pm-6:00pm: Networking

RSVP Required

 
For more information about the Silicon Valley-New Japan Project please visit: http://www.stanford-svnj.org/

 

Pieter Franken, Senior Advisor, Monex Group
Seminars
Stanford Silicon Valley-New Japan Project

Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Japan: Why Japan (Still) Matters for Global Competition

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Through the 1980s, Japan was significant in global competition largely by shaping global technological trajectories, transforming major global industries, and contributing to fundamental innovations in industrial production processes, creating enough wealth along the way to propel Japan to the world’s second largest economy. After the economic bubble burst in the early 1990s, however, other places such as Silicon Valley in the United States, moved to the forefront of transforming technology, industries, and production, creating vast wealth along the way. While Japan’s role in global competition seemingly became largely irrelevant from the 1990s onward, careful analyses reveal that Japan was in fact transforming quietly and gradually, but significantly. In a pattern of “syncretism,” Japan’s economic transformation was characterized by the coexistence of new, traditional, and hybrid forms of strategy and organization. This paper examines core areas of the “new” and emerging “hybrid” areas — the startup ecosystem and the efforts of select large firms to harness new forms of innovation from outside their corporate borders. Japan’s startup ecosystem, though still small compared to Silicon Valley, as is everywhere else, has dramatically transformed over the past twenty years through a combination of regulatory shifts, corporate transformations, and technological breakthroughs that have opened up vast new opportunities. Some large corporations such as Komatsu, Honda, Toyota, and Yamaha are undertaking innovative efforts of sorts unseen in Japan’s recent history to harness Silicon Valley and other startup ecosystems into their core business areas.

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Kenji E. Kushida

Yohei Saito

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Corporate Affiliate Visiting Fellow, 2016-17
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Yohei Saito is a corporate affiliate visiting fellow at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) for 2016-17.  Saito is the chief technology officer of Future Architect Inc., an IT consulting firm in Japan and leads the company's Technology Innovation group.  He has 15 years experience in software engineering and technological strategy.  Saito graduated from the Tokyo Institute of Technology with an M.S. in Computer Science.

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Big Data: Lessons from the Field

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Gaurav Kataria is a Big Data leader at Google who is responsible for driving Production Adoption initiatives across various Google for Work product lines - Gmail, Drive, G+, Hangouts, Google Docs, Drive, Android and Chrome. His group employs sophisticated machine learning and data mining techniques to understand the usage patterns across different products, and based on that creates programs to improve user engagement.

Gaurav holds a guest lecturer appointment at Stanford Business School where he co-teaches a course on 'Data-Driven Decision Making.' He actively supports the startup community in the Bay Area and is an advisor to multiple startups in mobile space. Prior to Google, he was a senior manager at Booz Allen and a researcher at Cylab - Carnegie Mellon. He has a Masters and PhD in Information Security Risk Management from Carnegie Mellon University and Bachelors in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology. He currently lives in Palo Alto, California and enjoys hiking the Bay Area mountain ranges in his spare time.

Gaurav will share his perspective on how to create a data-driven organization and the specific capabilities businesses need to develop to harness the power of machine intelligence.

AGENDA:

4:15pm: Doors open
4:30pm-5:30pm: Talk and Discussion
5:30pm-6:00pm: Networking

RSVP REQUIRED
 
For more information about the Silicon Valley-New Japan Project please visit: http://www.stanford-svnj.org/
Gaurav Kataria, Head of Product Adoption Google for Work
Seminars
Stanford Silicon Valley-New Japan Project

Understanding Silicon Valley and Startup Ecosystems: New research and academic classics you should know

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Kenji Kushida will provide an overview of canonical works of Silicon Valley, including work of Martin Kenney and his classic co-edited volume "Understanding Silicon Valley" and other more recent work drawn from the Stanford Silicon Valley - New Japan project’s "Top Ten Reading List of Silicon Valley." He will also share insights from a recent report co-authored with Richard Dasher, Nobuyuki Harada, Takeo Hoshi, and Tetsuji Okazaki entitled "Institutional Foundations for Growth" which partially draws from research on Silicon Valley.   

Kanetaka Maki will present his new research from a paper entitled "Milestones to University-Based Startup Success: What Is the Impact of Academic Inventor Involvement?” Based on the data analysis of 533 University of California startups, he will explain the impact of inventor involvement in the growth and success of university-based startups.

RSVP Required

 

Agenda
4:15pm: Doors open
4:30pm-5:30pm: Lecture, followed by discussion
5:30pm-6:00pm: Networking

 

For more information about the Silicon Valley-New Japan Project please visit: http://www.stanford-svnj.org/

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Philippines Conference RoomEncina Hall, 3rd Floor616 Serra StStanford, CA 94305
Kenji Kushida, Research Associate, Shorenstein APARC Japan Program and Stanford Silicon Valley - New Japan Project leader
Kanetaka Maki, Research Associate, Shorenstein APARC Japan Program
Seminars
Stanford Silicon Valley-New Japan Project

Smart Nation, Silicon Valley Technology and Asia Growth Strategy

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Co-sponsored by the Stanford Center for International Development and
the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center
 

Technological advances have brought us to a potential tipping point in the delivery of financial services that will affect the individual, firm, the industry and the country. How important will this development be for potential growth in developed and developing countries? Will the changes occur without official intervention, or will they need the state’s guiding hand to ensure that they provide their benefits with minimal risk? What measures are needed from policy makers and regulatory authorities to clear the path for faster growth?

This seminar, co-sponsored by the Stanford Center for International Development and the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, will look at how a group of companies, an industry and a country have effectively capitalized on conducive regulatory environment the opportunities offered by the technological advances and related disruptions. The talk will focus on the strategy of M-Pesa/Alibaba, Chinese Financial Sector and Singapore. The combination of Silicon Valley Technology and Smart Nation/City initiative may overcome some challenges of low productivity and low growth in many parts of the world especially in Asia and ASEAN.

David LEE Kuo Chuen is a visiting scholar at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) for the fall of 2015.  He is currently the Director of Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics.  He holds the appointment of Practice Professor of Quantitative Finance, Lee Kong Chian School of Business, in Singapore Management University.  He is also the founder of Ferrell Asset Management Group. His research interests encompass digital and Internet finance, digital banking, Asia finance, impact investing, financial inclusion and asset allocation. During his time as a Fulbright Scholar at Shorenstein APARC, his research will focus on harnessing Silicon Valley technology for connectivity and financial inclusion in ASEAN and Singapore. David is also an Independent Director of two SGX-listed companies and sits on the Investment Committee and Council of two charitable organizations. He is the Vice President of the Economic Society of Singapore.  He was the Founding Vice Chairman of the Alternative Investment Management Association (Singapore Chapter), a member of the SGX Security Committee, and MAS Financial Research Council.  He was also the Group Managing Director of OUE Limited and Auric Pacific Limited, as well as the Non-Executive Chairman of MAP Technology Limited. David speaks frequently in international conferences with occasional appearances in Bloomberg, Reuters and Channel NewsAsia.  He has published in Financial Analyst Journal, Journal of Investing, Journal of Wealth Management, Journal of Statistical Computation and Simulation, Applied Financial Economics, and several books and chapters on Household Economics and Hedge Funds.  His two books on Asia Finance focus on Banking, Sovereign Wealth Funds, REITs, Financial Trading & Markets, and Fund Performance. His latest book is on Digital Currency. He graduated from the London School of Economics and Political Science with a BSc (Econs), MSc (Mathematical Economics and Econometrics) and a PhD in Econometrics and Mathematical Economics.

Smart Nation, Silicon Valley Technology and Asia Growth Strategy
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Philippines Conference Room3rd floor, Encina Hall616 Serra StreetStanford, CA 94305
David LEE Kuo Chuen, Director of Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics and APARC Visiting Scholar
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Japan Colloquium Series
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Cloud Computing: From Scarcity to Abundance

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Cloud computing is a revolution in computing architecture, transforming not only the “where” (location) of computing, but also the “how” (the manner in which software is produced and the tools available for the automation of business processes). Cloud computing emerged as we transitioned from an era in which underlying computing resources were both scarce and expensive to an era in which the same resources were cheap and abundant. There are many ways to implement cloud architectures, and most people are familiar with public cloud services such as Gmail or Facebook. However, much of the impact of cloud computing on the economy will be driven by how large enterprises implement cloud architectures. Cloud is also poised to disrupt the Information Technology (IT) industry, broadly conceived, with a new wave of commoditization. Offerings optimized for high performance in an era of computing resource scarcity are giving way to loosely coupled, elastically managed architectures making use of cheap, abundant computing resources today.

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Journal of Industry, Competition and Trade
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Kenji E. Kushida

The Politics of Commoditization in Global ICT Industries: A Political Economy Explanation of the Rise of Apple, Google, and Industry Disruptors

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The global Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) industry has experienced a rapid, radical reorganization of industry leaders and business models—most recently in mobile. New players Apple and Google abruptly redefined the industry, bringing a wave of commoditization to carriers and equipment manufacturers. Technologies, corporate strategies, and industry structures are usually the first places to look when explaining these industry disruptions, but this paper argues that it was actually a set of political bargains during initial phases of telecommunications liberalization, which differed across countries, that set the trajectories of development in motion. This paper shows how different sets of winners and losers of domestic and regional commoditization battles emerged in various ICT industries around the world. Carriers won in Japan, equipment manufacturers in Europe, and eventually, computer services industry actors rather than communications firms emerged as winners in the United States. These differences in industry winner outcomes was shaped by the relative political strength of incumbent communications monopolies and their will to remain industry leaders, given the political system and political dynamics they faced during initial liberalization. The U.S. computer services industry, which developed independently of its telecommunications sector due to antitrust and government policy, eventually commoditized all others, both domestically and abroad. This paper contends that a political economy approach, tracing how politics and regulatory processes shaped industry structures, allows for a better understanding of the underlying path dependent processes that shape rapidly changing global technological and industry outcomes, with implications beyond ICT.

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Journal of Industry, Competition and Trade
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Kenji E. Kushida

Business Expansion from Japan into Silicon Valley, Opportunities and Challenges ~The Case of DeNA~

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The Stanford Silicon Valley-New Japan Project
Public Forum Series with Networking

 

Abstract:

As Silicon Valley continues to be a global center of innovation, companies from all over the world expanding into Silicon Valley face a variety of opportunities and challenges, with a wide range of lessons learned for Japanese firms as they make use of the Silicon Valley ecosystem. DeNA provides an interesting case. Founded in 1999, achieved explosive growth through a series of different business models, with particular success in mobile games and especially with the “mobage” mobile social gaming platform. DeNA entered Silicon Valley in 2008 and expanded its operation through the acquisition of San Francisco-based  smartphone gaming company, ngmoco, for $300M in 2010. Mr. Dai Watanabe has been navigating DeNA's period of transition to build a strong business base in the West. Dai will talk about DeNA's effort in Silicon Valley and his experience.

 

Speaker:

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Mr. Dai Watanabe is VP of Strategy and Corporate Development since the acquisition of ngmoco. He has also served as President of DeNA Global, Inc. since its establishment in 2008 as the U.S. subsidiary of DeNA Co., Ltd.. Dai has been in charge of DeNA’s global expansion strategy and execution since 2005. Prior to his US assignment, he served as President of DeNA Beijing. Dai began his career in Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation right after graduation from Kyoto University with a bachelor degree in Archaeology.

 

 

 

Tuesday, February 17, 2015
5:00 – 5:30 pm Networking
5:30pm - 7:00pm Lecture
Cypress Semiconductor Auditorium (CISX Auditorium)

Public Welcome • Light Refreshments

The Silicon Valley - New Japan Project

Cypress Semiconductor Auditorium (CISX Auditorium)
Paul G. Allen Building, Stanford University
330 Serra Mall, Stanford CA 94305
**Entrance is the Serra Mall side of the building**
https://www.google.com/maps?q=CISX+Cypress+Semiconductor+Auditorium@37.4295793,-122.1748332

Dai Watanabe Vice President of Strategy and Corporate Development, DeNA
Seminars

The Japanese Software Industry: What Went Wrong (and Why is it Important?)

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The Stanford Silicon Valley-New Japan Project
Public Forum Series with Networking
 

Speaker: Robert Cole (Bio)

cole robert ashx

Tuesday, January 27, 2015
5:00 – 5:30 pm Networking
5:30pm - 7:00pm Lecture
Cypress Semiconductor Auditorium (CISX Auditorium)

Public Welcome • Light Refreshments

The Silicon Valley - New Japan Project

 

 

Cypress Semiconductor Auditorium (CISX Auditorium)
Paul G. Allen Building, Stanford University
330 Serra Mall, Stanford CA 94305
https://www.google.com/maps?q=CISX+Cypress+Semiconductor+Auditorium@37.4295793,-122.1748332

Robert Cole Professor Emeritus, Haas School of Business, University of California Berkeley
Seminars
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